Negative Space

name?”
“Darren Higgins.” Max shook his head as what this girl was saying came crashing into him. “Look, why are you telling me this? I don’t talk about my father. I don’t talk about my mother, really. And where...where in God’s name do you get off claiming to be my sister?”
“Wait here,” she said. She smashed her cigarette against the concrete, then went back inside, returning several moments later with a creased and beaten photograph. She held it out and Max plucked it from her fingers.
“Look familiar?” Karen asked, lighting up another cigarette. “I have only one of him.”
Max looked at the photo: a gray-haired man in his fifties or sixties, dressed in a long coat and pointing toward the camera, his eyes burning as if prohibiting the photographer from taking the picture. Motion blur smeared the image.
Yes, he does look familiar.
“I don’t know, the picture isn’t clear enough,” Max said. “I suppose. Why? What does it matter?”
“It matters because of that void he left in your life. The article said he left when you were seven?”
“Yeah.”
“I honestly don’t know what’s worse, knowing your father and having him disappear or having him disappear before ever getting to know him.”
“Why are you saying you’re my sister?” Max repeated, his stomach knotting.
“Because I am. I know it. I can’t explain how I know, not really. Not yet—” She paused. “But I need you to trust me. And I want to show you some things of mine that I think you’ll understand.” Karen let out a stream of smoke. “I ran away from home, Max, and made my way out here. No one knows I’m here, not anyone from that life, at least.”
Max had encountered many things in his life far more unbelievable than this Karen’s claim, things he had more readily accepted. The idea he had a half-sister was entirely probable, especially if there had been no foul play to account for his father’s disappearance. But this was too hard. Not because it was unbelievable but because it was all too believable. All too possible.
He finished the hot sauce packet. Fished out another one.
“Oral fixation’s done a number on you, huh?” Karen said. “Let me guess—fellow ex-smoker?”
He nodded. No one had ever understood that before, not without first going through a puzzled face.
“How long did it take you to quit?”
“Like twelve tries,” Max said.
“Not too bad. I’m into double digits for sure. Like Mark Twain said, it’s easy to quit smoking. I’ve done it hundreds of times.”
The quote elicited a short-lived smile. Behind them, the front door opened and Karen’s Mr. Mover and Shaker came bustling out of the house. He regarded Karen and beamed. When he spied Max, his giddy spark died.
“Thanks again, so much,” he said to her, backing his way down the front walkway. He tried to put on his blazer but had trouble with the right sleeve. He laughed to cover up his embarrassed grunts.
“Anytime,” Karen said in an exaggerated Southern twang. Penelope’s voice, Max guessed. “Come back real soon, hun.”
Her dainty fingers waving in the dark. Almost musical, like they should be accompanied by chimes.
Mover and Shaker’s heel struck a sprinkler and he stumbled, chuckled, then turned around and continued toward a Jaguar parked under a streetlight.
“Your client looks flustered,” Max said.
“That’s James. That was only his second session here, actually. First time was a little hard getting him to do anything, he was so terrified that he was doing something wrong or immoral or against the law. I told him to relax—we all told him to relax, but he was petrified. Said he didn’t want to cheat on his girlfriend.”
“Doesn’t seem like cheating.”
“Right. No one’s having sex here. It’s just a healthy way to unleash your fantasies, your natural human curiosities.”
“So he’s pretty broken in by now, I take it?”
“Eh, kinda. He’s still having trouble, probably feels embarrassed. But whatever, I know he loves it, I can see it in his face.”
Karen quieted. Prickly silence. Despite the age difference, Max felt a fast-growing affinity with Karen. They’d been dwelling on the same floor their whole lives, but had just now met in a random sprint for the elevator that would either take them high or plunge them farther down into places they’d been to before, and never wanted to return.
“Hey, I get off pretty soon,” she said, flicking the cigarette onto the pavement. “Would you like to see where I live? I want to show you something, too.”
“I start work in a couple hours,” Max said. He was lightheaded. “So we’d have to make it fast. Depending on where you live, I suppose.”
“I don’t live far, just over near Santa Monica.” Karen checked her watch. “Listen, I’m due for another client pretty soon. It’s a half-hour session so it shouldn’t take long, but I’ve got to get ready.”
“Okay.”
“Can you wait for me?”
“I think I can manage.”
Karen gave a bittersweet smile and went to change or spruce up the room or do whatever needed to be done.
Max followed her inside, took a seat and made small talk with Lady Rose. He found a broken pencil in his pocket and amused himself by sketching on the back of forgotten business cards in his wallet, until Lady Rose noticed and offered him a wad of printer paper. He sketched the interior of the house, Lady Rose herself, and anything else that caught his eye, until Karen came out as Karen, undressed of Penelope, and announced she was ready to go.
***
II
The room dark. Sputtering gasps and breaths of someone either in dire pain or pure ecstasy. Karen flipped on the lights, revealing in all its unkempt glory the apartment and its current occupants: a young man and woman in a ball of sexual embrace on the couch. Much of their bodies were still clothed, but when Max saw the white loaves of the man’s ass, he averted his gaze.
Karen stood in the room, hands on her hips, watching them.
“Hey, K,” the woman breathed, muffled by the man’s shoulder.
Karen asked, “Viv, did